


Drink Your Wine Away Instead

by biggrstaffbunch



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-16
Updated: 2013-12-16
Packaged: 2018-01-04 19:43:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1084968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/biggrstaffbunch/pseuds/biggrstaffbunch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life moves on in the parallel universe, with or without Rose Tyler's good-will and well-wishes. Three lonely celebration in an alternate world, and one with company.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Drink Your Wine Away Instead

 

 

-  
 _only hope will remember_  
 _burning flame in december_  
-

London in the wintertime is always a hit or miss: either its dirty and wet and too populated by half, or it's a beautiful mess of sounds and sights and places to be. Right this moment, it's gorgeous and for that--Rose Tyler is grateful.

Because lately, loneliness has a way of dimming all the laughter and color from her life.

Tonight, though, the moon in the sky hangs fat and yellow and full, its nebula of stars blinking in time with the red and green lights strung up from rooftop to rooftop. The windows are dewy with melting frost, stickers of dancing candy-canes peeling off the glass. There's the muffled silence of snow steadily falling, layering stairs and streets with thick drifts of fresh, glittering white. And then the earthy smell of ham and turkey cooking, the bright flash of ornaments swinging precariously between fringes of tinsel, the gentle strains of laughter and music from Mr. and Mrs. Next Door's--

It's Christmas Eve at Powell Estates and Rose knows each detail with a clarity that stuns her.

The coming-together of sense memory haunts her in a way that's encompassed in the horizon line where black sky and white ground meet: there in the shimmering, hazy grey of it, where everything tilts just so, it's as if nothing is real. As if everything of this silent stillness is only a dream.

"Dreams are wishes your heart makes," Rose breathes to herself, voice brittle. Her bones ache and her words vanish into the air like puffs of smoke. She is tired of how fragile things are. She is tired of how quickly things disappear.

The city sounds are muted here. Nothing reaches these parts but the rise and fall of beeping car horns and tyres crunching gravel. Maybe the occasional carol lifting high and sweet in the air, joyous and bright in that way of songs about miracles and hope and goodwill towards man. Rose closes her eyes and breathes in through her nose; the crisp December air burns a little, freezes in the back of her throat and in the pit of her lungs, makes her chest seize. For the endless beat of an endless second, her heart stutters to a stop and everything narrows down to just the darkness, just the cold, just the easy quiet of this winter's night.

The low drone of a zepplin floating overhead rips slowly through the moment. A knife cutting further into time, the progressive unwinding of a clock. Rose opens her eyes and looks up at an unfamiliar spread of space.

It's Christmas Eve and this is not home.

A snowflake catches on her lashes; when she blinks, it melts, runs a chilled, wet stripe down her cheek. It's the closest she's come to crying since the day she collapsed into herself on a windswept beach. The closest she's come to mourning since being told she was dead.

Bullocks. Rose blows gently on her fingers, the wool warming her skin only slightly--she's not quite sure she'll ever get warm again, really. Not quite sure what she was hoping to see, either, coming here. A reminder of home? Something of her old life, perhaps. Something to remind herself where she's really from-- not Rose Tyler, Vitex heiress, but Rose Tyler of the skinned knees and crap dye jobs. Rose Tyler, with the eyes wide and full of the stars, with a head for galaxies and years, with feet itching to run on dusty planets and fingers skipping over uncharted maps.

Rose Tyler, who's currently standing outside a building she has no business being near, instead of at home with her family. Because--surprise--it turns out she might just be a _wee_ bit of a basket-case.

Rose snorts; she imagines Dr. Lee, Torchwood's grief counselor, writing in her notebook: _Rose has abandonment issues. Also, attachment issues. A wide variance of issues, to be fair. The girl is a few Daleks short of a fleet._

Well. Maybe she might be crackers. In any case, whatever it is she was looking to find here, she hasn't. Not tonight, maybe not ever again. Bottom line is, she can paint the picture of a Grande Olde Powell Estates Christmas all she wants, that postcard idyll of burnt casserole and her mum in a truly horrid Santa hat, but it'll never exist for her again. When the void closed between two worlds, Rose lost a hell of a lot more than just all of time and space at her fingertips.

She lost her roots.

Now she's cast adrift in a sea she has no idea how to navigate, and the alternate-world version of her childhood home is a buoy that's long been cast farther than she can see. It's time, Rose supposes, to learn how to swim. If only it weren't so damn _difficult_ to catch her breath in the deep waters of her new life.

She turns to begin the long walk back to Tyler mansion, her boots sinking into the snow with a curious sense of defeat. In the watery glow of the wavering starlight, every empty street corner is another glaring reminder of all that's gone for her now.

This universe has no big blue police boxes.

"Happy bloody Christmas," Rose mutters, wiping her face with a shaky, mitten-covered hand. "And to all a good night."

 

_-_  
 _i will begin again, i will begin again_  
 _oh, and maybe the time is right_  
 _oh maybe tonight_  
-

"Buggering _hell_ ," Mickey says, and he is as eloquent now as he has always been. Rose slips her hand through his; just because she's masochistic enough to keep coming back to this spot doesn't mean she's masochistic enough to come alone.

"Buggering hell," Rose agrees. Her eyes follow Mickey's. In the sporadic flash of the fireworks overhead, the building in front of them looks even more run-down than it did almost a week ago. So, more authentic, at any rate. She sighs and shoves a hand through her hair.

"'S this why you've been actin' the way you have, then?" Mickey rolls his eyes at the confusion on Rose's face. "Well, you've been _mad_ , Rose. Blowin' up at Jackie all the time, leavin' Christmas dinner halfway through, makin' me leave the New Year's party early--is this why? 'Coz of this?"

Rose sighs again, looking away at the incredulity in Mickey's voice. "Can't help it," she says shortly. "Mickey, I know I've been a cow, it's just--look." Her eyes when they meet Mickey's again are pleading. "Doesn't it look like home?"

A little blonde thing chooses that moment to follow her boyfriend out onto the balcony, confetti raining down around the teens as they share a laugh. The man is tall and skinny and dark and the girl is tiny and loud and bright, and they duck their heads together like they're sharing the secrets of the universe, beer bottles knocking together as their giggles filter into the clean night air. Rose feels something harden in her belly. Exactly a year ago, that was _her_. Her and the Doctor, watching the sky on New Year's Day. Relearning one another. Standing still in a world they were already leaving behind.

She reckons it's a healthy dose of irony that all she has left of her old life are the parts she never really appreciated at all.

"It's not home, Rose." Mickey's voice is hard, and it pulls Rose from her musings. It's been so long she's heard that tone. She almost doesn't know what to do. "Rose, listen to me." Mickey's hand squeezes hers, an urgency she's not used to feeling from him. "This place only looks like the Estates. Only looks like our past. It ain't, and it don't do you any good to keep coming here so you can wish on ghosts." His breath is like a ghost itself, rising sorrowfully in the air as he exhales. "Let it go, Rose. What's done is done an' we gotta start making a new way."

"I don't _want_ a new way, Mickey," and there's no heat to her words, just sadness. "I want the way I _had_. I wanna see the stars and meet new species and watch history as it's happening and fight _revolutions_." She shakes her head, self-pity pressing against her eyes. "I wasn't made for standing still."

Mickey's hand jerks out of hers. "And what, everyone else is? You're the only one who's got an itch to do some traveling? Here's a bit of news, Rose. No one's happy with their own sorry lives. Haven't you learned that by now? Think your mum wants to putter 'round the mansion, waitin' for you to finally join the land of the living? Think Pete _likes_ directing Torchwood but never seein' beyond his own planet? We move on, though, Rose. We make do, 'cause we all have stars in our eyes, but not all of us have the chance to escape in a big blue box."

Rose steps back as if she's been slapped. The air is suddenly sharp. "You did," she breathes accusingly. " _You_ were lucky enough."

Mickey touches her elbow and his expression is almost compassionate now. "Yeah, Rose, I was. I was _lucky_. I had my go with the universe, got to see a thing or two. I'll never forget that. But everything ends, Rose. Everything has it's time. And now, Rose, it's time for you to make a decision about where you'd rather be--livin' in a past that's impossible to get back to, or here, moving on with your family, with people who love you an' always will. Always."

It's the way Mickey keeps saying her name that finally pierces the teary frustration building up all cold and thick in the back of her throat. His voice is cajoling and stern, soft and steely, and even though somewhere along the way, Mickey Smith grew up to be a man, he's still the boy Rose has always known. He only wants the best for her. He only wants happiness for her. He only wants to remind her that she is still Rose, Doctor or not.

And Rose stands there, huddled in the cold, wondering if she _is_ still that Rose, the sort of Rose to whom he would promise 'always.'

She finds herself split down the middle with a curious disjunction. One half of her is straining to make a place here, her eyes wistful and large, skyscrapers looming in the reflection of her irises, the wind at her back as she turns towards a future that she could build, if she tried. But the other half is weightless and longing, tilting towards another dimension, memories too deeply ingrained in the beats of her heart to be remade into anything else. Rose feels the way her path diverges into a winding road, how her journey splits into branches of could-be's and what-if's and if-you'd-only-try's.

And she knows what her choice is, what her choice has always been, what her choice always will be, because one day, a Time Lord showed her _everything_ and now everything is exactly what she wants. No less, no matter what.

"I'm gonna make the decision you don't want me to make," she whispers, and Mickey's shoulders slump the way they always do when she says the inevitable.

"I figured," Mickey says evenly, and Rose loves him more in that moment than she ever has. "It just matters that you make it, yeah?"

Rose looks back to the shadow of this world's Powell Estates, and she knows that chasing ghosts--or gingerbread houses--is a slippery slope. Especially because she still believes (still _has_ to believe) that one day, however far in the future, she will have the real thing again.

"Yeah," she echoes, and takes Mickey's hand, lets him lead her away. A new year, a new start. She hopes. For the first time in a long while, she hopes.

Above her, constellations begin to blink out.

 

_-_  
 _some say things worth having take some time_  
 _as they get older, they get better_  
-

The world is ending and the Tylers are having a party.

Rose supposes she shouldn't be surprised--her mum always did enjoy a good time, and Pete's a bit of big news--can always be counted on to throw the smashing sort of celebrations that only the very rich can afford. And even though the skies outside are filled with planets that shouldn't be in this star system, let alone in Earth's orbit, there's loads of fancy dress and chattering people and the occasional couple snogging in the corner. Life, Rose decides, stops for no one and nothing.

Not even for the bloody apocalypse.

Even now, her fingers ache for the familiar holster of the dimension blasters, for the smooth curve of the dimension cannons, for the circle of the dimension transports. She wants to be amidst all the tech and the tools of what she knows, the madcap efforts to get back to where her feet feel right, where her legs feel sure. The basements of Torchwood Institute hold the only key to the salvation of this reality (and all realities, if Rose's suspicions are correct) and instead of getting that last calculation, instead of testing one more prototype, she's toasting to a couple that shouldn't even be.

Tonight is the anniversary of Jackie and Pete Tyler. The twenty-second, if they were going by Rose's internal clock. Or the twenty-seventh, because time here moves differently and it's this world's calculations they've all got to abide by. Her mum doesn't mind, even if it makes her seem older, because really, it's a sign of the most lasting relationship she's ever had, isn't it? Twenty-six years, and Jackie Tyler couldn't be happier, if the smile on her face and the ring on her finger is any indication.

Against all odds, two misfit halves have cleaved together into something quite whole, and even in the midst of the way everything is breaking down, Rose looks to them as an anchor.

It makes her head hurt, the improbability of it, and her heart, and so she just toasts to an old love grown new, to something lost found once again, and she tries not to think of what they had to give up to get one another.

Tries not to think of what she's giving up, tries only to think of what she's getting. A second chance.

Her palm curves against her thigh, and not for the first time, Rose is at a loss as to what the hell she's doing here. Even Mickey's back at the labs now, working his magic, tinkering with the same sort of grim determination that makes Rose think there'll never be another man quite like him. He understands her in ways no one else will, and right now, he's the only one who want to go back home the same way she does.

His gran is dead, and he has nowhere left to turn but up and over and above and _through_ , straight on through all the walls. With her, with Rose. Because neither of them belong anymore, do they, and just like back home, they'll link arms and forge their own way.

There's a side of her now that's buried in the silky folds of this long, black dress, more expensive than a month's worth of wages at Henriks back home. It's the side of her that's got on wobbly heels and glistening pearls, French manicure and a finger full of rings, the part of her that is twenty one years old and living, because by instinct, that is what she does.

And then there's the side of her that's watching this party unfold, and instead of champagne, her lips taste like time and space and the electricity crackling through the void, something old and brilliant and so inexplicable that it can't be anything but the recollection of a left-behind life. There's the side of her with dark roots and bold brows, the birthmark on her left arm and the crooked toe on her right foot. It's the pieces of herself that were born in another universe and belong in that universe, the pieces that she can't compartmentalize to fit into this place the way everyone wants her to try and do.

It's like she's a puzzle piece that's warped around the edges, and it's strange how even now, in the microseconds before she blinks, Rose can see a waver, a wobble, and she knows it's the world around her rearranging itself to explain her very existence.

"You do that a lot, you know," Pete says, and he's holding the squirmy little bundle of her brother in his arms. Tony is too young yet to have definite features, but she sees the Tyler jaw, there in the muddle. The round of his nose, the pink of his cheeks. It's weird to glimpse the ways in which her universe comes together with this universe in a perfectly harmonious manner, whereas she's like an orchestra with half the string section missing.

"What do I do?" Rose asks, distracted by the metaphors and the analogies floating around in her head. She finds that putting all the wordless emotions into syllables and sentences has made things a bit easier. A bit more solid, something tangible to process. And poetic, at any rate. A bit Doctorish, if she does say so--taking something complicated and making it so paltry human brains can understand. She smiles.

The world shimmers again; she blinks.

"That, the blinking," Pete comments, shifting Tony in his arms. Rose longs to touch the man who's become a father to her, to the baby who is her blood, but it's better to start cutting away at connections, she knows. Better to start shrinking back, because the barrier between worlds is loosening, falling away, and the moment her fingers brush that downy skin, she could just blink into another reality, easy as pie. It's better to keep saying goodbye with every breath, rather than miss out on any last words she might get this time around.

Pete looks at her shrewdly. "You're leaving soon," he comments, "aren't you?" The baby stirs, and Rose looks into her drink, into the dark, swirling depths. Somewhere, she hears her mother laughing, and she knows with pained certainty that this might be the last time she ever hears it again.

But tonight is their night, they've worked so hard to get here. And so, wordlessly raising her glass, Rose leaves his question unanswered and her gift to them is what she doesn't say: that really, in her heart, she left a long time ago.

 

-  
 _one number older, another year younger_  
 _i'll go to your party, you'll come to mine_  
-

Once everything is said and done, Rose isn't sure whether fifteen years have passed or five. The Doctor--the Doctor in the blue suit--tells her it's been more like a year, and she believes him because he's clever like that, but also because she'd hate to think she's really as old as she feels.

A circular journey if there ever was one, life in the parallel world feels a bit--well, infuriating, at first. The only solace is the Doctor's shoulder against her own, the fact that of all the goals that occupied all her thoughts every single moment from the first day on that beach to the very last, at least she got _one_ of the things--the most _important_ of the things-- she was searching for:

A hand to hold.

It's not perfect, because nothing ever is. She's finding out more and more about that sort of truth, because she sort of _has_ to--stuck here, now. For the foreseeable future, but for just one moment when she grabbed the Doctor by the collar and kissed him like she'd never before dared to, the future was more than just a tangle of lines, of things left undone. The future was _this_ : madcap adventures and stories to tell, adjustments to make and things to learn. Curiosity and pain and incredulity and laughter and everything bubbling over until Rose is sure that her human body can't contain all these human emotions.

But then there are also days when truths hit too close to home and the scope of her vision includes a life that looms ever closer. Gray hairs, bad hips, birthdays, mortality--it's not exactly the stuff of legends, and Rose hates that she's always surprised now when confronted with the fact of her own limitations, of _his_.

The Doctor falls sick exactly one year after he first crosses over into this world with her. Exactly one year, and because there's been a lot of everyone making allowances since the whole of existence almost ended, Rose lets her mum throw a rager of a bash just in his honor.

Late at night, after the birthday cake and the presents and the _mini-pony_ , he cuddles up to her in bed, so young, in such a young body, but with such old eyes, and he thanks her for giving him the first-- _best_ \--birthday he's ever had. She passes her hand over his cheek and feels his skin burning with fever. His eyes shine with heat, and his temperature is so high when Rose finally insists he lets her check it that they have no choice but to bundle him up and take him to the emergency room, and it's an entire night of bated breath before the attending physician declares the fever has broken and that it's alright to see him.

Rose walks into the room and flinches, unnerved by the sight of the Doctor buried under linens and dwarfed by a massive hospital bed. She ties her balloon to the bedpost, and then takes a seat, quietly noting that he's conned a nurse into giving him a birthday lolly as well. Her smile does not let the anxiety in her stomach abate.

She takes his hand as he blinks blearily awake, a glad sort of warmth touching the clammy features of his face as he looks at her.

"Hello," he says quietly. "Sorry to give you a scare." She gives him a soft sort of smile, winds her fingers more securely through his.

"Half human," she finally muses, her voice thin."You're half human." It feels like the first time she's ever said it out loud, despite being faced with it every day since coming back. It's strange, how finally naming a thing gives it power over a person, she thinks.

She gazes down at the easy fit of closely-clasped palms. It's the same as it's ever been, the way her hand looks in his, but it's impossible all of a sudden to forget what's changed. His hospital bracelet winds around his wrist, and she plucks against the plastic, runs her fingers across the seam of their fingers joined together. Is this what she fought so hard for, this shaky life, this wibbly-wobbly dangerous game of never knowing what's next? It's what she had in the other world, but this--this _living_ as humans do, as _people_ do, it's as new to her all of a sudden as it must be to him.

Uncertainty carves its mark on her face, deepening a delicate line between her brows, hardening the soft angle of her jaw.

He looks up at her, amused. Reaches his hand to smooth the shadows from under her eyes, a slow, deliberate touch. His thumb trips across her cheek, following the curve of her ear, pressing gently against the hot, soft skin of her neck. He feels her pulse, and his eyes go dark.

"One heart now, yeah," he murmers easily. "But! Half Time Lord, too," and then there is a tickle in her mind, a teasing sort of push at the doors right behind the bridge of her nose, where if she closes her eyes, all her secrets seem to fall.

A memory pops up in the dark of her mind, an image like a flash of light: the Doctor in his blue suit, his hair falling messily over his forehead, his eyes bright with some wild joy. She'd watched him while flying the TARDIS, his face illuminated in the gentle glow of the interior, and for a moment, she hadn't wondered who he was or who he wasn't. For a moment, she'd just known that this was a part of the Doctor, _her_ Doctor, clever and impossible and wonderful and just the slightest bit of terrible under all that benevolence. Nothing had felt more right in that instant than sliding her hand over the panel, interlinking her fingers with his, and smiling as wide as she could.

The pressure in her head decreases as suddenly as it began, and she blinks at him, feeling unaccountably shaken.

The Doctor speaks haltingly, looks unspeakably tired from even that amount of psychic exertion. "More than anything, I want to be that man you see in your mind, Rose. Indomitable, intense, _very_ good-looking. Infallible by the common cold. But I'm not, am I?" His voice fades a bit. "I'm something different, and we're still only just learning that." He touches her hair, and the way he moves, like his bones are brittle and his breath is gone, is such a chilling foreshadow of the future that Rose buries her face in his shoulder.

"Don't you ever think," he says, and even now there is that familiar sense of awe in his voice, "Only one year old, and already such new wonders to be seen! What else might there be to discover about this body?"

She doesn't know, but as she kisses him on the cheek, bristly skin under her lips, Rose promises him that they will find out together.

**Author's Note:**

> Reposted from LiveJournal.


End file.
